Tuesday, September 23, 2008

Eclipse templates and import statements

I was encouraged by this guy to make better use of Eclipse's code templates. I've used templates for a while for boilerplate code like adding a log4j logger to a class, like this:

class Foo {
   private static final Logger log = Logger.getLogger(Foo.class);
    ...
}

Using templates, I just have to type 'l4j' and cntl-space and there I go. One thing that had been plaguing me is that I still had to cnt-space again to add the imports, and thanks to Sun's needless duplication of effort, I had to select the log4j Logger over the lame java.util.Logger.

Little did I know about the ${import} and ${importStatic} variables. The following template gives me the required imports for free.

${imp:import(org.apache.log4j.Logger)}
private static final Logger log = Logger.getLogger(${enclosing_type}.class);

And how about this for JUnit 4 imports:

${imp:import(org.junit.Test)}
${impst:importStatic('org.junit.Assert.*')}

With enough Eclipse templates, Java might not drive me completely batshit after all. I love it when I file a bug and the feature already exists. Thanks, Eclipse.

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